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SmartBear Eases Continuous Delivery With New Jenkins Plug-in

SmartBear delivered a new TestComplete plug-in for the open-source Jenkins continuous integration tool.

SmartBear Software released a plug-in of its TestComplete automated testing solution for the Jenkins open-source continuous integration platform.

The new TestComplete Jenkins plug-in helps simplify and streamline the continuous delivery process by making it easy for users to automatically execute and report on TestComplete tests through Jenkins. Users deploying the new TestComplete Jenkins plug-in are able to balance speed of application delivery with quality.

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where teams keep producing software in short cycles and ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time. The practice is used primarily to automate and improve the process of software delivery. Techniques such as automated testing and continuous integration enable developers to build software to a high standard and easily package and deploy it to test environments. Continuous integration is the practice of merging all developer working copies with a shared mainline several times a day.

“Delivering high quality products rapidly to the marketplace necessitates having immediate feedback on the deployed build,” said Nikhil Kaul, product manager for testing products at SmartBear, in a statement. “The new TestComplete Jenkins plug-in helps organizations completely automate build-test processes for functional as well as API tests. Faster application delivery thereby becomes a breeze as teams can now test the quality and reliability of every build without any kind of manual intervention.”

Further reading

When implementing continuous delivery schemes, development shops often simplify the release process by prioritizing product backlog and releasing requirements in small increments frequently. This helps minimize cycle time between teams and accelerate application delivery schedules. Yet, testing can act as a bottleneck to such faster application delivery processes, SmartBear said.

Manual testing can be inefficient, time consuming and error-prone. Similar inefficiencies may be encountered while implementing automated testing practices. Scaling functional, non-functional and API tests for different testing environments can prove challenging and complex. Additionally, manual handoffs between development and automated testing teams result in an increased wait time, delaying faster feedback on the build and causing rework to accumulate, SmartBear said.

When out-of-the-box integration with continuous integration tools is not available, testers often end up spending a significant portion of their time triggering automated tests through a clunky command line interface, the company said.

Using the TestComplete Jenkins plug-in, developers and testers can execute desired desktop, Web or mobile automated tests directly from Jenkins. Once tests are executed, results are automatically updated to Jenkins, minimizing the handoffs between development team and testing team and providing rapid feedback for the development cycle. The faster feedback loop on the build also helps developers find defects at the source code level quickly, reducing cycle time for fixing defects and helping achieve increased focus on quality.

TestComplete’s built-in functionality along with the new plug-in enables users to easily scale a variety of automated functional and API tests across multiple user acceptance testing environments.

“In a continuous delivery model, having an ability to deliver quickly as well as ensuring quality debt doesn’t build up due to faster release schedules are equally important,” said Murat Polat, a senior test automation engineer at Unisys and an early user of the plug-in. “The new TestComplete Jenkins plug-in delivers flawlessly on both these benefits. Automation capabilities of TestComplete combined with the new plug-in will make it much easier for many of my customers to implement continuous integration and test automation, while ensuring quality of their release does not slip.”